Custom software
If several people at your company edit the same spreadsheets and hours disappear every week into copying data around, you are already running on a system. Just one that was never built for the job. Excel is a great tool for calculation and analysis, but as a system of record, a process manager, and a multi-user database, past a certain point it becomes expensive and risky. This article helps you spot that point.
If three of the six ring true, switching stops being a matter of comfort and becomes a business decision you can put a number on. So let’s run the numbers.
Spreadsheets look free. In reality you pay for them in admin time. A simple example: if 4 colleagues each spend 5 hours a week copying, reconciling, and fixing errors, that’s 80 work hours a month. At a fully loaded employer cost of 4,000 HUF (about 10 EUR) per hour, that’s 320,000 HUF a month, close to 4 million HUF a year. And that doesn’t count the lost order, the item invoiced twice, or the decision made on bad data.
By comparison, a focused internal tool that replaces this process is a one-time build of 2 to 5 million HUF. The payback is usually somewhere between 1 and 2 years, and after that the system earns its keep. We broke the pricing down in detail here: how much a web application costs.
When people hear the word switch, many of them picture rolling out a big, all-in-one enterprise management system, and it scares them. Fair enough, because that really is a lot to swallow. The good news: you don’t have to do it that way.
The recipe that works is to go step by step. We pick the single most painful process (say, order tracking) and build one narrow, focused web application for it. Login, data entry, statuses, search, an export for accounting. That’s it. The rest of the spreadsheets stay where they are. Once the first tool has proven itself, the next process can follow. This is basically MVP thinking applied to internal systems.
Two more things are worth checking before you decide. The first is the market for ready-made subscription software: if your process is standard (a plain customer database, for example), an off-the-shelf SaaS may come out cheaper, an angle we covered in the SaaS chapter of the web application pricing article. The second is automation: AI tools can already take some of the repetitive admin work off your hands, and you’ll find examples in our AI chatbot for companies article.
A typical project with us goes like this: in the first week we walk through your current spreadsheets and the real workflow (not the one that lives in people’s heads, but what your colleagues actually do). Out of that comes a short specification and a quote broken down by hours. Development runs between 6 and 10 weeks, and at the end your existing data is cleaned up and moved into the new system. We don’t lock the old spreadsheets; they die off on their own as the team gets used to the new way. That’s the best feedback you can get that the system really is better.
For one service-provider client of ours, moving their job sheets out of spreadsheets and into a proper system cut the weekly time spent on admin roughly in half, and every job sheet has been searchable ever since. No magic, just the right tool.
When should I NOT switch yet? If a single person uses the spreadsheet, only occasionally, and no business processes run through it. Excel is still great for analysis and calculation, and there’s no reason to replace it there.
How much does an internal system that replaces Excel cost? A tool that serves a single process runs between 2 and 5 million HUF (roughly 5,000 to 12,500 EUR). The price is driven mostly by the number of user roles, the integrations, and how complex the data migration is.
What happens to our existing data? After cleanup, it moves into the new system. This is a separate part of the project, and worth taking seriously, because it’s your one chance to sort out the contradictions in the old spreadsheets for good.
Should we buy ready-made software or build something custom? Ready-made for a standard process, custom for a custom process. The practical rule of thumb is to compare the total 3-year cost: the monthly fee times 36 on one side, development plus maintenance on the other.
Send us the spreadsheets your company runs on today (the structure is enough, no data needed), and we’ll tell you what we’d replace first and why: contact us.